Work Matters

Tag: Google

  • Google: “A place where it simply isn’t efficient to act like an asshole.”

    I just got off the phone with a reporter who was asking about Google, which topped Fortune's best place to work list for the third time.  He wanted to talk about Google's lavish perks and how being a great place to work might be a result of their success rather than a cause. I agreed that money does buy a lot of goodies and massive financial success is such a powerful perfume that it can make everything smell better than is really the case. But I am less cynical about Google than most winners of such awards because of things that have been in place, and from what I can tell, have largely been preserved, from the start that go beyond their famous luxuries, good food, and generous compensation — and put them a cut above many top tech firms that provide similar goodies.  

    The first reason is that Google does not unduly emphasize status differences among people at different levels or within in the same level.  If you watch how people interact there — receptionists and executives, young engineers and senior executives, and people from less prestigious versus more prestigious parts of the company — the more powerful people treat the less powerful people with an unusually large amount of respect, even deference, and the less powerful people don't cower or kiss-up nearly as much as I see in most places.   Yes, Googlers are sometimes guilty of being arrogant when it comes to outsiders (although I see signs of modesty creeping in), but I have to give Larry and Serge credit for creating such norms mutual respect from the start and building an organization that appears to have sustained them  (in fact, just yesterday, I found an old interview that Jeff Pfeffer and I did with Larry Page in late 2002, and he talked about the importance treating everyone with respect and how often the people Google hires showed him that his initial opinion was wrong).

    The second reason, as senior executive Shona Brown told me in 2006 or so (she was #4 in those days, and now heads Google.org), is that Google appears to be a place where it simply isn't efficient to act like an asshole.  When The No Asshole Rule first came out, I did a talk at Google and asked the crowd if Shona was telling the truth.  The general sentiment was she was right, but more telling was, afterwards, a young woman came up to talk to me.  She patiently waited for everyone else to leave.  Then she seemed rather nervous as she started talking about Shona's words.  This woman admitted that she really  wasn't a very nice person. But after a few months at Google, she learned that she had to be nice to everyone, because otherwise, she couldn't get anything done!  Now that is a sign that an organizational norm is working.

    So, while Google is imperfect, as all human organizations must be, it is nice to see that "don't be evil" still appears to infect the company's soul, that Google seems to demonstrate it is possible to be an effective and civilized organization, and that treating people probably does help bolster and sustain performance in this iconic company.

  • Dan Pink: “It’s a short step from scale to sclerosis.”

    Dan's lovely quote is from a story in this morning's New York Times.  It is about how Google has become so big that it has lost its start-up feel and some of its best employees are heading for more exciting places, especially Facebook.  As further evidence of Google's concern about a talent drain, Google gave every employee a 10% (or larger) raise this month.  I agree with the story's premise that Facebook is one of the hottest employers in Silicon Valley, partly because they do give technical folks very cool work (although so does Google) and partly because they are pre-IPO, so there is the lure of a big payday when they go public. 

    The challenges of scaling an exciting small company into a big one are not easy (see this great post by venture capitalist on Taking The Mystery Out of Scaling a Company, which I will likely do a longer post on soon).  But I do think that Google has done a pretty good job here; size creates complexity that is unavoidable, but they've done a good job of staying pretty lean and not adding excessive rules and constraints compared to most rapidly growing companies.  But the process whereby people leave a once small company to start their own company or to join a smaller and more exciting one has always been part of the growth cycle in every company, especially in Silicon Valley.  Indeed, during the glory days of Hewlett-Packard, they fueled the growth of Silicon Valley with employees who left to start their own companies (including Steve Wozniak; his Apple PC to them, but they didn't want it).   Although the loss of specific employees was regretable, these same employees helped fuel an ecosystem of innovation that benefits HP to this day — and the same is true of Google. 

    I wonder, what other companies have impressed people for their ability to scale without sclerosis, and which companies are horror stories of red-tape, unnecessary rules, and petty politics, and bulky bureaucracies?

    P.S. The large company that has done the most impressive job of scaling (although there are some unattractive features about them) is Wall-Mart.  Their lack of excessive complexity and action orientation is really something.